As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Rory Sutherland. Not only is he very thought-provoking, he is quite funny — in fact, given the opportunity to watch a professional comedian or Rory Sutherland, I’ll choose Rory Sutherland every time.

If you are a reader, he has some books out, most notably “Alchemy.” If you are more a video or audio person, there are a gazillion interviews with him on Youtube. Just search for “rory sutherland,” and you’ll be busy for the rest of your life if you want to be.

Wherever you find him, he bangs on about one central theme: Rational thought is good, but if you want to understand the world, you need to 1. recognize that you don’t and never will, and 2. ditch the expectation that rational thought is going to do more than get you a little bit of the way there.

He gives this great example of an email marketer for a theater group in London. She found that when she offered tickets at a discount, the conversion rate went down, but when she offered them at full price, the conversion rate went up. She said the theater should offer tickets at full price.

The theater’s board pushed back, requiring that she continue offering tickets at a discount. They were so lost in the thrall of conventional economic theory, which says if you want to sell more of something, offer it at a discount, that they couldn’t even see the hard evidence mounting in front of them.

You see, the theater-goers were making a much more human decision. After all, going to the theater was a real pain for them — they had to find a babysitter, find a place for dinner and drinks afterward, find a taxi, leave the kids, etc. They didn’t want to jump through these hoops for some show that was so sub-standard it had to discount its tickets. No, if they were going to jump through these hoops, they wanted to know a show was good, and they would happily pay full price for it.

Here is the point for your presentations:

As much as you think that you understand your audience, it is entirely likely that you do not. And so you need to hold your faith in your understanding loosely.

A good way to start is to ask your audience what is valuable to them. But often audience members will not know what is valuable to them. Remember that quote by Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

So don’t just ask your audience what they want and then give that to them. Ask them to describe their bigger picture, and then imagine what it would be like to live in that world.

They aren’t holding back on giving you the full picture because they are trying to cheat you or mislead you, it’s just that maybe they don’t even know themselves.